K2 Network has acquired the APB: All Points Bulletin intellectual property from defunct studio Realtime Worlds, reports GamesIndustry.biz (registration required), where they say the operator of free-to-play MMOG service GamersFirst paid a reported £1.5 million for the game, which may be up and running again before the end of the year. They have not confirmed this with K2, but seem pretty convinced the story is accurate, saying to expect an official announcement in the coming week. They also say to expect the game to use a free-to-play business model when it relaunches.

The game did have some potential, but it felt half finished, along with a raft of bad design and business model choices. My hope is that K2 takes this as a starting point to redevelop large parts of the game, and make it much closer to what players wanted in the first place. With the right choices and enough development effort, they could turn this into something profitable.

The worst decision would be just to re-release it with some minor business model changes. Even a F2P game needs to be fun enough to suck people in. Take Battlefield Heroes, no amount of free or paid in-game items could ever make that game worth playing.

If any of you were thinking of playing this when it is restarted, I would think again. The big problem the game had was all the cheating going on and if you are not familiar with K2, they probably have some of the worst support in the business.

i.e. this reissue of the game will be inundated with exploiters galore and little if nothing will be done to them.

I guess if you are a cheater, you can have fun with this game otherwise I would not touch it.

K2 didn't buy the IP to reactive it. They bought their technology in a salvage sale to make games. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an engine when you can buy one for 1.5M pounds (2.4M $US)?

It's just the Unreal Engine, and not the first for a 'MMO'.

"I've never seen a feature like this before. It warms your ass. It's wonderful" -Walter Bishop

K2 didn't buy the IP to reactive it. They bought their technology in a salvage sale to make games. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an engine when you can buy one for 1.5M pounds (2.4M $US)?

Because they'd still need permission from Epic? APB ran on a modified UT3 engine, which Epic worked along side RTW with to get it working for the mmo. In fact from what I remember Epic was actually really excited in seeing APB get released so people could see a UT3 Engine MMO.

Either way, the game wasn't terrible. It just needed a little love. If it's F2P and they plan on fixing the bugs, I may go back and play it occasionally.

kxmode wrote on Nov 11, 2010, 11:09:K2 didn't buy the IP to reactive it. They bought their technology in a salvage sale to make games. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an engine when you can buy one for 1.5M pounds (2.4M $US)?

What makes you say this, was there even any special technology behind the game, from what I played I did not see anything particularly innovative? I believe it was a modified unreal engine as well, so they wouldn't even be getting their own custom engine. If it was a full fledged MMO engine I could see that kind of investment paying off, but not for what it is currently. I realize it cost way more than that too make, but that doesn't give it value.

Even with licensed engines companies need to extensively modify to make the engine do what they want. That's what Bethesda did with the Gamebryo engine for Oblivion and Fallout. Valve also did this using the Quake engine for Half-Life. Why would a company license an engine and then spend millions of dollars to modify, when they can simply buy years of development for a fraction of the cost via an IP salvage sale? I think K2 got a great deal.

kxmode wrote on Nov 11, 2010, 11:09:K2 didn't buy the IP to reactive it. They bought their technology in a salvage sale to make games. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an engine when you can buy one for 1.5M pounds (2.4M $US)?

What makes you say this, was there even any special technology behind the game, from what I played I did not see anything particularly innovative? I believe it was a modified unreal engine as well, so they wouldn't even be getting their own custom engine. If it was a full fledged MMO engine I could see that kind of investment paying off, but not for what it is currently. I realize it cost way more than that too make, but that doesn't give it value.

K2 didn't buy the IP to reactive it. They bought their technology in a salvage sale to make games. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an engine when you can buy one for 1.5M pounds (2.4M $US)?